Republican Deficits vs. Democratic Deficits

June 30, 2010

President Obama's rebuff on stimulus spending by the G-20 and the latest Republican roadblock on the Senate jobs bill is producing fears of a deeper, double-dip global recession. While Thomas Frank urged the U.S. to avoid the "austerity trap," Paul Krugman warned that the "pain caucus" here and in Europe could produce the "Third Depression."

But behind the tidal wave of austerity fever threatening to wash away the U.S. recovery is a fundamental split between the two parties on when and why the federal government should run up deficits in the first place. Simply put, Republicans embraced massive deficits during times of prosperity, while Democrats turned to deficit spending to fight the recessions and economic hardship the GOP helped produce.

That's the record of the past generation. Under Republican leadership, economic common sense was upended. The national debt tripled under Ronald Reagan and, after the budget surpluses of the later Clinton years, doubled again under George W. Bush. As analyses from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities show, the Bush tax cuts accounted for almost half the mushrooming deficits during the last decade and, if made permanent, over the next 10 years would produce more red ink than two wars, TARP, the Obama stimulus package and the revenue lost to the recession combined.

That Republican "debt orgy," as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) aptly labeled it, largely served to produce a massive transfer of wealth to the richest Americans needing it least. (That perverse development is reflected in "the Bush 400", the richest 400 taxpayers in the United States who saw their incomes double and tax rates halved between 2001 and 2007.) As the New York Times' David Leonhardt noted last year, that windfall for the wealthy, the Medicare prescription program, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were never paid for.

More at Perrspectives: Bringing Light to Darkness

Reagan tripled our national debt.

Clinton started to pay it off.

Bush doubled the national debt over again.

AND THEY HAVE THE NERVE TO TALK ABOUT DEFICIT NOW?!?!

Then they whine to their Democratic daddy when they take it away and have to pay it off.